And that's just the start.
"Pay $50k this week or we delete your data. The yearly bill will be $200k"
For a teenage coding club.
this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2025
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Slack is so overrated. Isn’t there similar open source software for this, that businesses could run from their own server?
Believe it or not, the article mentions that they're already moving to such a thing.
They opted out of moving to Mattermost. After the uproar that saw the slack ceo and cpo going to hacker news to do damage control, slack gave them 5 years of free "enterprise +," their highest tier. Apprently the slack ceo and other exec also called and apologised to the hack club founders.
It is disappointing that hack club opted to stick with Slack, but i get why they may be overwhelmed and maybe feeling the effects of a charm offensive. I'm betting, although nothing has been announced, that Slack and its Salesforce billions, is going to make a donation down the line too.
Hopefully they spin up at least some parallel infrastructure. Some of the teens were commenting that this was an eye opening experience for them about owning your data, so at least that will likely stick.
Do you have a source for the extra context you added here? I read this as they are still using Slack but working on migrating away on a more reasonable timescale (which after this kind of experience seems very sane).
The founders comments in the hacker new thread, plus some other errant ones from hack club users.
Here is there "we are staying on slack" comment:
Hi, update here (this is Christina, Hack Club cofounder): looks like Hack Club is staying on Slack.
Thanks to all of you for the appreciation and support for Hack Club, and for listening to what we were going through. The support has been amazing. Hack Club has so many cool teenagers coding awesome projects, making friends and solving problems together, and it's great to see so many people championing them. We are glad to stay on Slack and want to do so much more with them together going forward.
Thanks to Denise and the Slack leadership team for reaching out here on hn, and in a call directly with me and Zach today. And thank you for restoring Hack Club's terms with improvements. We really appreciate it, and we're glad to be able to stay on Slack.
I just want to add that it was great to get to know Mattermost and the team- and the hack club engineers were actually pretty excited to move there. It's an amazing product and for it to be open source is awesome.
She doesn't mention the "new rate" but it was apparently confirmed internally, and there is a comment in that above thread that lists it.
Ah thanks. Well hopefully that's all just lip service to cover them while they shift over to something they control anyway.
Best case for their charity is likely to stay on Slack to get them as corporate sponsors, but add "data sovereignty" as a core part of their curriculum. That keeps the charity going, but instills the foss ethos in all their students.
Who knows though. They have 5 years of free slack either way because it would be incredibly bad PR to revoke it now. The runway is there to exit cleanly at least, which is a lot more than they had before.
There's plenty:
Mattermost seems to be the most generally liked, Matrix/Element is the most open, Rocket.Chat is the most feature packed. And there's also Zulip which I don't know that well.
Then there are also dozens of much smaller names.
Matrix
I recently went with Mattermost because its structure is a lot simpler and doesn’t use federation. Probably more than enough for most small use cases.
I’ve tried Matrix/Element in the past and imo, there’s way too much setup for simple little internal applications, even via docker.
FYI there are alternative matrix servers to Synapse. I'm playing around with Tuwunel, it's a single binary and you're done.
It uses rocksdb so you just give it a directory and it puts everything there,. ie no need to spin up a db. And there is a config option to disable federation if that's something you don't want.
Could it scale to thousands of concurrent users? Probably not but it seems to be the simplest chat app to self host I've found.
I’ll look into this. Thanks for the recommendation!
Mattermost
Zulip is pretty great.
Recently saw a Slack ad where one hipster proclaimed that he’d “probably quit” if his team stopped using Slack. What a weird hill.
Often is between Slack and Teams which would make me get up on that hill.
This ad is based on reality because if they quit Slack then the company will go over to Teams which everyone knows, makes its users wanted to dropkick their computers.
Why would a hacker club want to use a commercial normie core platform like slack?
If you're relying on someone else's computer to keep your data safe, don't be surprised when they use that data as a hostage to demand more money. Sure, using other peoples' computers to host your infrastructure can make a lot of sense. Just be sure you have a backup plan for when they send Guido around to demand more money.
The ceo of slack replied to the person from the hacker club in a hacker news thread and cleared it up. They said it was a billing mistake and are continuing their original deal.